Chia Yin Hsu | Russian Involvement in the Election: Kompromat, Ideology, and the Role of the State

On April 13th, 2017, Professors Chia Yin Hsu and Cassio de Oliveira delivered the lecture “Russian Involvement in the Election: Kompromat, Ideology, and the Role of the State.” The run-up to and aftermath of the election has been marked by accusations of Russian meddling and interference in the electoral process. These two lectures aimed to explain the Russian perspective in connection to the U.S. elections.

The Provost’s Office hosted a campus-wide lecture series on pre-and post-presidential election-related topics with a format of a 30-minute lecture or group panel discussion, followed by a 30-minute opportunity for discussion on the complexities of how government works and its implications in an area of their scholarly expertise.

Chia Yin Hsu is Associate Professor of History at Portland State University. Her research areas include late-Imperial and early-Soviet Russian migration to the Russian Far East and North Manchuria, and Russian colonialism in China. She teaches courses on Russian history and topics on ethnicity and nationality in Imperial and Soviet Russia. She has published on railroad construction and railway tourism in Manchuria and the Russian Far East, and on the currencies and monetary practices of this region.

Cassio de Oliveira is Assistant Professor of Russian in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Portland State University where he teaches courses on Russian language, literature, and culture, especially film. Cassio’s research interests include Soviet literature from the 1920s and 1930s, Russian film, and translation studies. He is currently at work on a book manuscript, provisionally titled Writing Rogues: The Soviet Picaresque, 1921-1938, in which he analyzes the emergence of the picaresque mode in Soviet literature of the NEP era and High Stalinism.